Afrigadget and Grameen Phone.
Though seemingly quite different, they are both dedicated to poverty alleviation. And they are each making a tremendous difference in their own ways.
Afrigadget is about “Solving everyday problems with African ingenuity.” This is perhaps my favorite website, because it makes painfully clear how clever people can be when they really need to be. The common people and inventors featured on Afrigadet don’t have the luxury of waiting around for someone else to solve their problems. Instead, they invent (relatively) low-cost solutions to problems like irrigation and transportation.
I remember seeing one post, last year I believe, about a school that had wired a generator and battery to their merry-go-round. They harnessed the power of play to light the school at night. Brilliant! And healthy.
Similarly, the site recently featured a new tool that used the principle of a typical stair climber (like the kind you might find in your local gym, or maybe in your recreation room under some clothes if you are like me). This device is actually a pump that uses human power to acquire and distribute water for farming.
I think about this and sit looking at my iPhone, wondering whether we in the ‘industrialized world’ are missing the boat in our application of technology.
But then I think of Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameen Phone and someone I had the pleasure of meeting at The Fletcher School of Tufts University last year. For your own viewing pleasure (and because he obviously delivers his message with great conviction) here’s a link to his presentation at the TED conference: Iqbal Quadir: the power of the mobile phone to end poverty.
Iqbal tells the story of growing up in Bangladesh and working as an investment banker in New York City during the early days of ethernet networking. As I recall it, he experienced an outage one day and waited, frustrated, as the MIS team went terminal to terminal looking for the problem. Reflecting on his home country, he realized that communication is the key to productivity.
From here, Iqbal set off on a course of empowerment that included microfinancing from Grameen Bank – the only partner capable of offering credit and managing distribution in the remote areas of the country. Together they got cellular phones into the hands of female villagers. These new entrepreneurs borrowed money which they paid back by charging neighbors for phone use. To make a powerful story short (and so you can get on to watching the video and hearing it for yourself), this idea is an example of bottom-up economics at its best.
People are making money and their lives are getting better as they empower the others around them.
That’s something for us all to think about as we experience this great economic contraction and consider how we will redesign our lives with meaningful work.
Tomorrow I’ll share my most recent inspiration…D.Light.
AfriGadget
Kiva